I’ll start with a book I recently read and loved: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer (whose other novel, Annihilation, just enjoyed a movie adaptation).

Borne paints pictures of a strange, bleak world that captivates with bizarre creatures and desperate humans. VanderMeer creates characters of depth torn apart by the mysteries and terrors of their world.

More specifically, Borne tells the story of a woman named Rachel, who finds a strange, shapeshifting creature she names Borne. In this world, where a giant flying bear named Mord roams the skies and dominates the wastes, Rachel and her companion Wick scavenge and survive. They wander the land, sticking to the shadows to avoid other dangerous scavengers. Meanwhile, the Company, the alleged source of Mord and the chemical waste, looms in the distance. Inside the Company, perhaps Rachel, who remembers little of her life before the waste, can find answers. 

The story pins Rachel as a bleak investigator of her world, trying to understand the growing, childlike Borne and her relationship with it. She tries also to understand the Company and its functions, Wick and his strange conditions, and the Magician, the mysterious woman who roams the wastes and encroaches upon Rachel and Wick’s hideout. Where the story ultimately goes from this premise, I did not expect.

I read Borne in less than a week. VanderMeer’s writing captivated me throughout. Reading Borne was like traveling to a foreign country, in which nothing was familiar and everything was a question mark. Every page felt like the unraveling of just the most basic  of answers, tethered together by the beautiful burgeoning relationship between Rachel and Borne. 

As the conflicts between Rachel, Borne, Wick, Mord, the Company, and the Magician arise and resolve, the novel asks cutting questions about the future of humanity, especially concerning our current environmental woes: if the world devolves into barren wastelands, what will we hold on to? Who will we turn to, and how will we cope? Will we grow to accept the strange and unfamiliar, keeping together our kindness and love? Or will we give in to savagery?

As VanderMeer writes, “We all just want to be people, and none of us really know what that means.”

While Borne sounds bleak–is bleak–I felt surprisingly optimistic about the world after reading it. Even if the world gets much worse (which it often seems to be doing), there will still be things worth living for. As I think Borne reveals, it’s just a matter of climbing out of your hole of despair, reframing your perspective to encompass the larger context of the planet, and finding new forms of solidarity and community. The world will change, maybe even collapse, but so long as there are humans, we will find things to live for, and likely find ways to thrive. 

With that said, Borne also serves as a warning against complicity in our own collapse:

“Once, it was different,” Rachel reflects at one point. “Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.”

The world of Borne continues to nag at me–despite it’s improbable beings, it feels too close, too possible. We don’t want that world.

Now, is this novel flawless? No.

There was a slight lull in pace in the middle of the book. It lacks fast-paced action. It can feel morbid, although it somehow remains vigilant. 

However, nobody should expect a perfect book, and with that in mind, this is one that I wholeheartedly recommend. Even if you might step away feeling briefly dejected, it’s worth your time.